Unfortunately those claims "all men are created equal and endowed with rights" are premised on Man having a creator, which is a theological truth claim. Sans a creator, you're just a smart ape, and apes don't have rights. Patrick Deneen summarized this best in Why Liberalism Failed. Enlightenment liberalism relies on a monotheistic frame…
Unfortunately those claims "all men are created equal and endowed with rights" are premised on Man having a creator, which is a theological truth claim. Sans a creator, you're just a smart ape, and apes don't have rights. Patrick Deneen summarized this best in Why Liberalism Failed. Enlightenment liberalism relies on a monotheistic framework while simultaneously undermining the same.
To that end, wokeness actually fills a gaping (and intentional) hole in liberalism -- how to define right and wrong. Enlightenment liberalism avoids religious conflict by effectively privatizing morality, but no society can exist without some shared definition of "right" and "wrong". 1700 years of Judeo-Christian cultural inertia masked this hole for a couple of centuries, but we've burned through that now. Finally the 60's postmodernists detonated a truck bomb into the middle of that void and we've been living the the moral carnage even since.
I am a post-liberal because I think privatizing morality doesn't work; any such society implodes into anarchy or tribalism. I don't know what the answer is (yet), but we need some commonly agreed framework for deciding "right" and "wrong" or we will descend into a conflict between the woke and the ethno-nationalists (which are really just 2 sides of the same coin.)
Brian, I appreciate your pov, but it’ll be hard for us to convince one another in this forum. I think that non-religious people can be moral and religious people can be immoral. In the end, the only thing that matters in establishing a government is reliance on man’s fallibility and selfishness. Therefore - democracy, federalism, checks and balances, equality and free speech are iconic American principles adopted to safeguard the system from authoritarian takeover. If you want religious leaders, you can elect them. Our current problems with wokism stem not from lack of religion in government, but from the failure of private religious and charitable communities and families to give young people a feeling of purpose. The progressives worked diligently to fill that void and dominate educational institutions and the media, while the conservatives were still listening to talk radio. Lack of campaign finance reform, loyalty tests in both sides of the aisle and corruption is where the government is failing us. At this point, what we need is to build a coalition of religious and fiscal conservatives, libertarians, rational thinking atheists, patriotic immigrants and anyone else who is willing to stand up against the indoctrination of the radical left.
Unfortunately those claims "all men are created equal and endowed with rights" are premised on Man having a creator, which is a theological truth claim. Sans a creator, you're just a smart ape, and apes don't have rights. Patrick Deneen summarized this best in Why Liberalism Failed. Enlightenment liberalism relies on a monotheistic framework while simultaneously undermining the same.
To that end, wokeness actually fills a gaping (and intentional) hole in liberalism -- how to define right and wrong. Enlightenment liberalism avoids religious conflict by effectively privatizing morality, but no society can exist without some shared definition of "right" and "wrong". 1700 years of Judeo-Christian cultural inertia masked this hole for a couple of centuries, but we've burned through that now. Finally the 60's postmodernists detonated a truck bomb into the middle of that void and we've been living the the moral carnage even since.
I am a post-liberal because I think privatizing morality doesn't work; any such society implodes into anarchy or tribalism. I don't know what the answer is (yet), but we need some commonly agreed framework for deciding "right" and "wrong" or we will descend into a conflict between the woke and the ethno-nationalists (which are really just 2 sides of the same coin.)
Brian, I appreciate your pov, but it’ll be hard for us to convince one another in this forum. I think that non-religious people can be moral and religious people can be immoral. In the end, the only thing that matters in establishing a government is reliance on man’s fallibility and selfishness. Therefore - democracy, federalism, checks and balances, equality and free speech are iconic American principles adopted to safeguard the system from authoritarian takeover. If you want religious leaders, you can elect them. Our current problems with wokism stem not from lack of religion in government, but from the failure of private religious and charitable communities and families to give young people a feeling of purpose. The progressives worked diligently to fill that void and dominate educational institutions and the media, while the conservatives were still listening to talk radio. Lack of campaign finance reform, loyalty tests in both sides of the aisle and corruption is where the government is failing us. At this point, what we need is to build a coalition of religious and fiscal conservatives, libertarians, rational thinking atheists, patriotic immigrants and anyone else who is willing to stand up against the indoctrination of the radical left.
Ironically, on all of that, you and I agree 100%.